Collective phenomena in gauge theories. I. The plasmon effect for Yang-Mills fields

This is the first of a series of papers devoted to many-body phenomena in gauge theories. We assume that weak and electromagnetic interactions are described by a spontaneously broken gauge theory and that the strong interactions are described by an asymptotically free non-Abelian gauge theory. The implications of these assumptions for the behavior of matter at finite temperature and/or chemical potential are the subject of this series of papers. Briefly, the three main areas to which our results pertain are (1) renormalization of finite-temperature field theory, (2) the equation of state of strongly interacting matter at high densities in gauge theories, and (3) elementary-particle interactions in the early universe.